Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory

OCEANOGRAPHIC AND ATMOSPHERIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

NOTICE: You may soon notice a change (in appearance only) to these Internet web pages as we upgrade and improve our site in the coming weeks. The data products themselves will of course remain unchanged. Thank you.

An important aspect of the work at PFEL is the development of new
techniques and data products which will assist in describing the
variability in the ocean environment. ERD scientists also are actively
involved in quality control of these data and products, and conduct
ongoing research to understand how the data can be used to describe
the ocean environment, and linkages between environmental variability
and fluctuations in the abundance and distribution of marine populations.

In 1996, PFEL hosted a workshop
identifying new directions in the application of environmental data to fisheries research
and management.
Research is directed to large-scale climatic variability, to
environment/recruitment relationships in eastern boundary currents
(EBC) and to mesoscale (smaller scale) processes affecting coastal
circulation and fisheries recruitment. Examples of this research
include studies of recurring ocean temperature changes off the west
coast of the U. S. and their effects on groundfish recruitment, and
investigation of the environmental changes in EBC ecosystems associated
with El Nino and other climate events.

PFEL also prepares products in response to
special requests for environmental data for specific research and management
projects. PFEL contributes regularly to several NOAA programs, including
NOAA Coastwatch, NOAA News,the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program and CEOS (Climate
and Eastern Ocean Systems).